Pressure grows to give young homeless hope
Sam Miller has slept in parks and on beaches for the past three years, getting drenched when it rained and going without showers when none was available. He’s unemployed and joined a construction apprenticeship program but was kicked out after a few weeks — it was too hard to make the 7:30 a.m. classes in Hunters Point.
“For me the biggest challenge is keeping my head together,” said the 20-year-old Sunset District native.
Miller represents an emerging face of the San Francisco’s homeless crisis: the young adult who is squeezed out by high rents and the shifting labor market, forced to surf couches or live outdoors. For years this population took a back seat as the city focused its resources on the chronically homeless, who use more emergency services and cost more money than younger people.
But now young homeless people are starting to draw more attention, both in San Francisco and nationally, bolstered by social movements like Occupy, which shed light on income inequality and the lack of opportunities for young people, and by an Obama administration goal to end family and youth homelessness throughout the country by 2020.
San Francisco has become a test case for that effort, secur-
ing a $2.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in January to come up with a plan to eradicate youth homelessness. Now the handful of service providers who help the city’s “transitional age youth” — people ages 18 to 24 who live on the streets — are clamoring for some of the money.
At the same time, youth homelessness has become a topic of interest at City Hall, as the mayor and Board of Supervisors gear up to pass a new budget this summer. Constituents are railing about street kids in the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods, and political pressure is building to house them.
“I saw this one kid who was passed out in my district, just above the escalator at the Castro Muni Station,” said Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, who has made youth homelessness his main political cause. “And then I saw a couple officers drive up and get the kid up. Then I’m taking a Lyft to my next meeting, and the same kid is passed out in front of Pink Triangle Park, right across the street.”
Sheehy, who called for a hearing this month on youth homelessness, said he worries about young people being sidelined while the city prioritizes their older counterparts for shelter beds. He wants to direct more taxpayer money to help them and to open a drop-in center for young homeless people.
Supervisor London Breed meanwhile, has focused on young transients in the Haight. Over the past three years, she helped secure more than $500,000 in city funding and private donations for an organization called Taking It to the Streets, which shepherds the Haight’s young homeless people into single-room-occupancy hotel rooms downtown — Sam Miller is among the organization’s clientele.
Supervisor Mark Farrell, who represents the Marina, is also addressing the issue, scouting for sites to build new housing for this group.
Youth organizations that have long competed for the city’s homeless resources are seeing political will to boost their projects. But it’s not coming from the street kids themselves, said Jodi Schwartz, executive director of the Castro LGBTQ center Lyric, which serves homeless kids in the area.
“A lot of the push in District Eight doesn’t come from the young people who need housing,” Schwartz said, “It comes from the constituents who say, ‘I’m tired of looking at these young people on the street — do something about it.’ ”
Homeless young adults are a complex and hard-to-serve group. In San Francisco nearly half of them identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and many say they are estranged from their families or trying to flee abusive relationships. As a group they tend to be less visible than the chronically down and out, who are more likely to interact with police or wind up in emergency rooms, said Paul Boden, head of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a grassroots group pushing for better treatment of homeless people.
“You don’t really see youth hanging out on the street,” said Boden, 57, who lived on the streets in New York and San Francisco from ages 16 to 23. “When I was out there, we squatted. We hid from the cops. And if one of us got a room, we were all staying there.”
Young adults are also less inclined than their older counterparts to use the city’s shelters, said Zachary Franet, 23, who got off the streets last year and now works for a property inspection company.
“When I was homeless, I would have found some place to hole up for a month rather than check in to one of these shelters,” Franet said. “I feel like it’s absolutely essential to have a space for youth to be among their peers.”
San Francisco has made incremental progress on young homeless people, increasing supportive housing stock for this group from 25 to 127 units during Mayor Ed Lee’s term, with an additional 70 units on the way. The city’s most recent homeless counts suggest that the number of young adults and unaccompanied children has gone down — from 1,902 in 2013, to 1,569 in 2015. The 2017 numbers won’t come out until summer.
But San Francisco still has huge service gaps for youth, said Sherilyn Adams, executive director of the Tenderloin nonprofit Larkin Street Youth Services.
“There’s a long-standing need for mental health, substance abuse, and crisis-response systems that are specific to young people,” she said. “On the ground we’re seeing young people who are in crisis and desperate around housing — which makes them feel suicidal and frustrated and angry — and they have limited resources.”
Other service providers pointed to signs of increased hopelessness among young homeless adults, despite the city’s efforts to help.
“In the last year we’ve seen an escalation of self-harm, suicide and interpersonal violence among queer and trans people, as well as more people stepping into abusive relationships in exchange for housing,” said Schwartz, the head of Lyric. She blames that violence on the stress of the housing market.
While politicians and service providers generally agree that the city needs to invest more money in its young adult homeless population, they disagree on how the money should be spent. Some are lobbying for more housing units. Others want better mental health systems.
Jeff Kositsky, director of San Francisco’s new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said the best way to help young homeless people is to reunite them with family, or to give them more rent subsidies so they can focus on getting back into the workforce.
“I’d argue that for transition age youth, it’s better that they’re not in permanent supportive housing,” Kositsky said. “What we really want is for these kids to get a career and get back on track with their lives. The interventions are really different.”
Kositsky conceded that San Francisco needs to boost its investments in services for young people and said the federal grant will help. But he also stressed the importance of using statistics to decide where homeless dollars are spent, rather than shifting from one political agenda to another.
“I’ve been doing this work in San Francisco since 2000, and what I’ve seen is that we tend to pivot back and forth — ‘let’s focus on shelters, let’s focus on families, let’s focus on supportive housing, let’s focus on youth,’ ” he said.
If the city keeps doing that, he said, “we’re never going to address the problem.”